ON CAPITOL HILL

Did Hagel rig vote to win Senate seat?

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

An attempt by Senate Democrats to push through their controversial nominee for defense secretary, former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., failed today on a 58-40 vote as Republicans said they haven’t been given answers to their questions.

“Hagel, an unknown millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seats in 1996 … trailed the popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected in a landslide two years earlier. Three days before the election, however, a poll conducted by the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of respondents favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor of the Gallup Poll, told the paper, ‘We can’t predict the outcome,'” Harpers said.

“Hagel’s victory in the general election, invariably referred to as an ‘upset,’ handed the seat to the G.O.P. for the first time in 18 years. Hagel trounced Nelson by 15 points. Even for those who had factored in the governor’s deteriorating numbers and a last-minute barrage of negative ads, this divergence from pre-election polling was enough to raise eyebrows across the nation,” Harpers continued.

“Few Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes: Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems). Hagel stepped down from his post just two weeks before announcing his candidacy. Yet he retained millions of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group, which owned ES&S. And Michael McCarthy, the parent company’s founder, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer,” the report said.

The report said: “Whether Hagel’s relationship to ES&S ensured his victory is open to speculation. But the surprising scale of his win awakened a new fear among voting-rights activists and raised a disturbing question: Who controls the new technology of Election Night?”

In the next election, a relatively unknown Democrat ran against Hagel, but he collected only 70,000 votes from the 400,000 registered Democrats. His demands for an investigation of the vote-counting were unsuccessful, the report said.

“Although no single instance or aspect of vote fraud was likely enough to tip the election for Obama, the aggregate of their corrupt activities – including illegal campaign donations, taking advantage of states without voter ID requirements, military ballots delivered too late, as well as the laundry list of elements identified in this report, may well have been.”

Further, the analysis found the media provided perhaps the greatest in-kind benefit to the Obama re-election effort. The media provided Democrats an advantage of countless billions in biased reporting. It suppressed news unflattering to Democrats while exposing or even contriving stories damaging to Republicans and mischaracterizing their positions, while uncritically promoting the Democrat narrative:

The mass media have been, with a few notable exceptions, largely silent on the “Fast and Furious” DOJ gunrunning scandal responsible for the deaths of two Americans and countless Mexicans. Eric Holder has been able to successfully deflect calls for an independent investigation of Fast and Furious because the media offers no pressure.

CBS withheld its knowledge of the Petraeus affair until after the election to save the administration embarrassment

The administration withheld a damning food stamp report showing the biggest monthly increase in a year, until well after the election

“They took liberties with the law Republicans would never dare attempt and obstructed voter-integrity efforts at every turn, while the vast political-media-entertainment-education-union-nonprofit complex went all in to promote Obama’s narrative.”

Democrats and their media allies also engaged in what has been described as a dishonest and “vicious” campaign to discredit the Republican nominee while steadfastly shielding the administration from its many scandals. Any of these scandals could have sunk Obama’s reelection prospects had the media reported them with the enthusiasm they showed in attacking and spreading disinformation about Romney.

The Obama campaign continues to accept illegal donations from other countries. WND’s Aaron Klein proved this by donating to the Obama campaign twice under the name “Osama bin Laden” using a Pakistani web address.

WND has filed a complaint with the FEC demanding an investigation of overseas donations to the Obama campaign.